Halls of History, Fame, Oddity and Wonder

By RICHARD F. SHEPARD

Published: January 4, 1991

TIRED of standing in line to see Mexican at the Met? Weary of looking high and low at the Museum of Modern Art? Wondering what's hanging on other walls while the Guggenheim reworks its bobsled ramp-run? Never mind, you ain't seen nothing yet, to coin a cliche (for other coins, try the American Numismatic Society in Harlem). The city that rarely owns up to a past as it ages gracelessly is home to more than a hundred museums and the multi-chambered megamuseum is but the tip of the burg.

Whatever is collectible, from the divine to the eccentric, is probably under glass somewhere within the New York City line. There's a Hall of Chinese History in Chinatown. At Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, there's the Harbor Defense Museum of New York City. The Garibaldi-Meucci Museum of the Order Sons of Italy in America in Rosebank, S.I., has an exhibition honoring the Italian liberator who was guest in this century-old landmark house when it was home to an Italian-American inventor, Antonio Meucci.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street takes a decidedly different tack from the course of Aunt Len's Doll and Toy Museum in Harlem. New York's museums cast their nets too wide to hold all their catch in these pages. The ones described here are emblematic of the diversity in store for the curious, who will be rewarded thematically, architecturally and informationally in their quest. There's a SoHo museum with two floors of antique fire engines. Another museum, in Brooklyn Heights, gives us Brooklyn family portraits of the sort not to be seen in a gangster film.

A visit to a historic Flushing house will make you an expert on Queens movie palaces of yesteryear.

In a Jewish enclave of Spanish-speaking north Manhattan, you can learn about a 500-year-old forced mass emigration from Spain.

The Lower East Side Ukrainians, although awash in East Village bohemians, make a proud show of their past and present a few floors up on Second Avenue in Manhattan.

But first, as the old recordings in the Museum of Broadcasting would say, a word about the 18 subway cars and the people who love to board them, even though they are not going anywhere except backward in time.

The New York Transit Museum is a one-of-a-kind, an underground museum that is, barring a last-minute reprieve, an endangered species. Its extinction, in the name of economy, has been voted by the powers that be. As of this moment, no actual date has been set for the end of the line and rail buffs can still make tracks to this unusual institution, a few flights down in the old and immaculately kept station of the IND line's quondam Hoyt-Schermerhorn (in local dialect, Hert-Schoimerhorn) shuttle in Brooklyn. On the station's two levels is an assortment of turnstiles (some proclaiming a 5-cent fare), a very graphic large-scale three-dimensional map of the system and 448 of its 458 stations, maps of other-city subway lines, subway car models, a demonstration model of the safety signal system, lanterns that used to indicate the destination of trains, and, of course, the 18 cars now berthed at the platforms. One may walk through and sit in the cars, which date from 1903, with open-sided platforms at each end, to 1963, an IND steel car.

The current show, through next October, is an exhibition of architectural drawings -- including under-river tunnels and over-valley viaducts -- of the early 1900's that were designed for the first section of the IRT line, the forerunner of all others.

New Yorkers, it sometimes seems, do not get to the Forbes Magazine Galleries in Manhattan as often as out-of-towners beat a path to the door of this sleeper of a museum. Malcolm Forbes designed this enticingly escapist space in the ground floor of his magazine empire headquarters as a home for his fantastic collection of toy ships and soldiers, with very real famous manuscripts, a dozen Imperial Easter Eggs designed by Faberge, and an art exhibition thrown in for good measure. It is a splendidly ebullient display from the moment one enters the gallery in which the armada of more than 500 toy boats are deployed. Accompanying it is a triumph of museum show music down to the sound of ship whistles and appropriate nautical airs. The sound track and scenery change as one enters the next gallery, which is home to 12,000 toy soldiers, in ranks serried according to flag, historical era and war. In one setting is World War I; in the next, a battle among the ancient Greeks; in another, a German ambulance corps back in 1914 to 1918 tends the wounded. In addition, a small-scale Great Plains is the arena for the winning of the West.

The figures represent the dogfaces of all history, as well as the leaders, from Alexander the Great to George Washington. Great for the children, but there's even more here for the mature.